Mallory Hawk releases debut album, ‘Chinook,’ helping her plant roots in Philadelphia through variety and introspection

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Singer-songwriter Mallory Hawk reflects on growing up in a military family and letting go of past traumas and revisiting moments on her debut album “Chinook.”

The album, named after the military helicopters she often heard while growing up on and near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, features 10 tracks recorded across sessions at Headroom Studios and Retro City Studios in Philadelphia.

The City of Brotherly Love captured Hawk’s heart early on when she moved from the South to the Northeast after studying English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Artistically, [it’s] one of the most culturally rich places, especially for rock music and guitar music,” Hawk said about her move to Philly. “Everybody just kind of embraced me and made me feel welcome while I was recording and it was kind of a no-brainer.”

Before settling in Philly, Hawk first lived in Boston before spending nearly a decade in New York, where she first began writing songs. After going through “music bootcamp” and playing in multiple bands, such as Customer and Trace Mountains, she realized the next step was to set out on her own path.

“After all the bands I was in kind of fell apart in New York, I was like, ‘It’s time,’” Hawk said. “It’s time to spread my little wings and do this all myself, and I’m really glad I did.”

How Hawk addressed trauma and ‘intense’ upbringing on debut record

“Chinook” offers personal reflections on the circumstances surrounding her upbringing amid the war on terror, and upon leaving her home, realizing where she grew up is “not how everyone else operates.”

“That just was branded all over our life,” Hawk said. “The helicopters and the cannons and hearing those things just outside my childhood home and thinking it was quite normal, when it’s really not.”

The war hit closer to home when her brother enlisted in the military and was immediately placed on the front lines.

“It was quite intense to be honest,” Hawk said. “He went to Afghanistan, he went to Iraq, they immediately stationed him in Alaska. He had a super isolated and terrible experience. My mother was constantly worried about him and that affected everything in our life.”

Her experience was not unique, as the stress of military life was also seen in her school peers, including times when they would come over to her house and when she visited others.

“Some of my high school best friends, their fathers were so highly ranked in the military that the kind of information that they were holding while just having dinner or doing a jigsaw puzzle with me was kind of intense,” Hawk said. “I know this now, but [at the time], I didn’t realize what a special forces person was doing.”

Those moments became entangled with her early involvement in Christianity having attended church from her early childhood through her sophomore year in college. The sixth track on the album, “Low Rise,” came about when staying in her childhood room and putting on an old pair of jeans from her high school days.

“I was just transported to this version of myself,” Hawk said. “When I went to college, I was fading a little bit with it, but I really didn’t want it to fade. I was really hoping that I was going to have some kind of awakening and I was going to feel like I could be a Christian again, and it never happened.”

This combined with her early struggles with her own sexuality and identity created a lot of self-doubt and constant questioning that stuck with her for years.

“I put the low-rise jeans on and I thought about when I was a teenager and how I knew that I wasn’t straight, but I knew that I had to be straight and I knew that I had to be pure,” Hawk said. “I was so afraid of God. I really wanted to be his perfect child … I was terrified that I was going to go to hell, so I feel obviously free from that now.”

Bringing bigger textures and grunge influences to ‘Chinook’

Recording for the album initially began after Hawk moved back to North Carolina for a short stint. With some help from producer Sam Acchione, Hawk traveled to Philadelphia for three- or four-day stretches before deciding to live in the city for a month to bring the project to completion.

While making the long drives back to Philadelphia, Hawk took the time to go through the CDs she’d started collecting though her childhood.

“I became totally obsessed with Alice in Chains and even Pearl Jam and these things that I interacted with as a kid,” Hawk said. “It’s just revisiting something as an adult and taking completely new meanings from it … Alice in Chains are known for doing those really unsettling, beautiful harmonies, and that was something that I quite instinctively just started to utilize on my record.”

The relationship between the two collaborators was strengthened by their appreciation for rock music, which she said she only shares with a few people.

“Sometimes I saw limits for my songs that maybe he didn’t,” Hawk said. “I knew I wanted bigger textures on certain things and I wanted to have these like full atmospheres and all this kind of stuff, but I just wasn’t exactly sure how to make that happen.”

Reflecting on the process, Hawk said the switch from making demos at home to recording in a studio helped her start to “dream quite bigger” with the initial concepts.

“It was just like, ‘Oh, we can add this kind of percussion,’ or, ‘We can add in this old organ,’” she said. “Having those possibilities was not something that I was used to.”

Softer moments on the record like “Four O’Clocks,” a track about her early childhood home that was demolished to build a highway connecting to the military base, are contrasted by songs like “Caretaker,” a punk song with driven amps and guitar solos.

“I remember writing and recording my demo of that song,” Hawk said. “I was just trapped in a tiny little room in my apartment and I was very mad and I was just screaming into my microphone. And then I was just kind of like, ‘Yeah, that rocks.’”

“Superhighway” was also noted as an “outlier” by Hawk that takes inspiration from a demo she made with her earlier band Customer, turning it from a punk song into a new wave track.

“I was just really obsessed with a lot of Eastern European dark wave at the time and I was ordering cassettes from Russia, and I was just inclined to make a song like that,” Hawk said.

Overall, the album represents a smorgasbord of influences and aspects of Hawk’s writing that introduces listeners to different directions she hopes to explore.

“It’s funny to see that stereotype just come to life that I am a girl with an acoustic guitar sometimes and they think that I’m just going to make some folk music, and I don’t,” Hawk said. “I like records that are fun to listen to, I like variety, and I don’t know what my future records are going to sound like either and I think that that is quite thrilling for me as a songwriter.”

The album is available via streaming and CD.